Branch pivots to D2C, delivering $1.5m in monthly sales after just 8 months

When Covid hit, Branch’s B2B sales disappeared. Greg Hayes and his team had to figure out what to do.
They quickly decided to pivot into Direct To Consumer, selling home office equipment through their online store. They adjusted their site, built new marketing campaigns and once they launched, it took off!
Soon, they were out of inventory and were trying to figure out how they'd get the funds to buy more stock.
Using Wayflyer funding, they were able to increase their inventory purchases and invest more in marketing. Both helping to drive their D2C business.

After only 8 months in D2C, they are now making over $1.5m per month and have their sights set on even bigger targets.

This is their story.

Buying office furniture sucks

In 2018, Greg Hayes discovered a problem—buying office furniture sucks. It was this discovery that led Greg to found Branch. He had the vision of making it easy for teams of all sizes to create an office they truly loved.

With his co-founders Verity Sylvester and Sib Mahapatra, they quickly built a very successful business, selling high quality office furniture direct to enterprises.

Then, Covid hit.

Like many business owners, Greg and his team faced a massive challenge due to Covid. With people no longer going into offices, their enterprise business had pretty much disappeared overnight.

But Greg is not the type of guy to go down without a fight.

Pivoting to D2C

Greg and his team decided to pivot the entire Branch business and start selling furniture directly to consumers. With more people working from home, they thought there could be a huge opportunity to help people kit out their home offices. Thankfully, Branch’s range of products was suitable to sell directly to consumers, but, they still needed to figure out how to advertise to this new market.

Greg had built an incredibly talented, hard working team at Branch and they quickly figured out how to acquire new customers. Within 3 weeks of pivoting to D2C, they were sold out!

There was clearly a huge demand for their products. Greg now needed to buy more inventory, but he had already invested a lot of money into pivoting the business into D2C; “”how are we going to fund this?” That’s what I kept thinking about” says Greg.

Using Wayflyer funding to fuel D2C growth

It was at this point that Greg started talking to the team at Wayflyer.

“It was super impressive how quickly the Wayflyer team was able to move”, says Greg. “We told them what we needed, and they were able to put a deal together for us straight away”.

Greg used the funding from Wayflyer to purchase the inventory he needed to grow Branch’s D2C business and the results have been incredible! “We have been able to grow at a record pace”, says Greg, “we’ve taken our D2C business from $0 per month in April 2020 to doing $1.5m in January 2021.”

Using Wayflyer Insights to learn more about his business

Greg has also used Wayflyer Insights to help him make better decisions for his business. “It’s nice to have a dashboard where I can go and see all of the metrics in one place rather than having to dig through our different marketing accounts”, says Greg.

As someone who doesn’t consider himself that “techy”, Greg likes how the dashboards make it easy for him to understand what is going on in his business “The simplification and visualisation of the graphs make it easy for a layman like me to understand”, says Greg.

What does the future hold?

“We have plans for aggressive growth”, says Greg, “we want to be a $100m company by 2022.”

With the resilience Greg and his team have shown in 2020, it’s a brave person that would bet against them.

“With help from Wayflyer, we’ve been able to grow at a record pace. We’ve taken our D2C business from $0 per month in April 2020 to doing $1.5m in January 2021”